Friday

Therapy Session At The Circle K

Don't tell me where I'm going;
you think I'm alone but you can't know
that from time to time, I sleep side by side
with beautiful girls who are afraid of the dark.
Slivers of shine beneath our random doors are never
enough, so we let up the shades of rented rooms,
flood the dead space with the dead glow of commerce.

Tonight it's the Circle K, happy round pearl
ringed in red, looming foot upon foot above the asphalt
of south avenue; everything caught within its ovum
glitters. Whores pass back and forth, showcased at its base;
tiny statues of saints hang from their lobes, depend on ribbons
from their necks; they shimmer like shattered glass.
Beside me balls some beautiful girl, asleep outside her shadow.
Her skin is olive and damp; I think of angels with emerald lips.

It seems just yesterday, I carried tricks
in a tin box covered with rock-star-hip-cats strumming their
air guitars in primary colors. My smile was brilliant, I alone
invented the high gloss of good veneer. In some city somewhere,
buzzcut ladies dance naked in glass boxes, bodies like suede cages.
In my city, dumpsters brood behind the open-all-nights, shelter
refuse from a foregone rain. No one ever told me not to spill
the milk, no one ever said that fight holds consequence too large
to recall. I never knew I was a sinner until the magic failed.

So you guessed it, Doc, I'm bothered by
a little thing or two; I don't sleep like I should, and I've got
a lily busy dying on my ktchen table. It doesn't seem to matter
how I'm aware of how selfish I can be, no one noticed when I ceased
to care. I appreciate your time, but time is a measurement of thought,
and I think too much. Logic is a beautiful girl locked against my dark,
mouth parted in the pretense of sleep; she knows, they know,
I know that I never really loved myself.

GRIND IT UP AND SPIT IT OUT, THEY SAID

Eat Your Words

"I know we're not saints or virgins or lunatics; we know all the lust and lavatory jokes, and most of the dirty people; we can catch buses and count our change and cross the roads and talk real sentences. But our innocence goes awfully deep, and our discreditable secret is that we don't know anything at all, and our horrid inner secret is that we don't care that we don't."— Dylan Thomas